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Education Innovation in Action

The Informatics Skunkworks is a group of undergraduate researchers dedicated to realizing the transformative potential of informatics tools for science and engineering. Undergraduates work with faculty and industry to apply techniques of machine learning to problems such as image analysis and materials property prediction. Participants learn skills in research, problem solving, computer programming, data science, presentation, and team problem solving that are critical for many of the most attractive jobs in our economy. Over their first year the Skunkworks has gained over 15 members across two UW system schools, established collaborations with over six faculty and companies, and are presently writing their first paper for publication.

Engineering ‘Hangouts’: Practicing Online, Realtime Engineering Presentations in a New EPD 275 Course for Co-Op Students

Laura Grossenbacher and Christina Matta

Coming this Summer 2016, the Technical Communication Program will be rolling out a fully online version of our EPD 275 Technical Presentations course, designed for undergraduate engineering students to take while they are off campus on co-op or internship; we believe such an approach can leverage advanced collaborative technologies to help students develop their online presentation skills in realtime but at a distance: students will come out of the course fully prepared to successfully hold online group meetings, share their technical expertise, and engage directly with their audience, skills we believe will be valued by industry.

The poster/exhibit will offer attendees the opportunity to ask questions about our evidence-based online active learning instructional model, see example UW-Madison learning technologies used to facilitate our online courses, and better understand what active learning actually looks like within a fully online learning environment. We will highlight the key components that have helped us build, in partnership with our CoE partners, one of the most highly regarded and top ranked online graduate engineering education programs in the country. We look forward to interacting with faculty and staff interested in online learning, and exploring opportunities for future collaboration.

Juniors in industrial and systems engineering have a full design experience in a novel experiential design course that provides students with the tools and experience needed to succeed in their senior capstone design course. For an entire semester, student teams prepare a proposal for a fictitious client who will select the best design from working demonstrations of their concepts modeled from LEGOS Mindstorms microprocessors and Textrix robots. Blended learning is used to present students the conceptual ideas and design tools they will need to move forward with their design project such as project management, measuring a customer’s needs, concept generation, and systematically evaluating the best design, while the students , build and test on their prototypes in the laboratory.

Status of Diversity in the College of Engineering: Successes and Challenges

ME314 – Manufacturing Fundamentals – Revamped and Flipped – A story of Extrusion

Erick Oberstar, Michael Decicco, Luke Van Hulle, Travis Sossaman

ME314 – Manufacturing Fundamentals was completely flipped (lectures are now recorded) and revamped around a 3d printing platform to make lab content more cohesive and alleviate bottlenecks in the course due to limited copies of laboratory equipment. The original curriculum topics were preserved and re-cast around a 3D FDM printing platform to form cohesive content that continually ties back to the 3D FDM process. Topics covered include Factory Automation (PLCs), Close Loop Control, CNC, metrology, and economics.

Computer-delivered and graded exercises are great for learning in blended and flipped classrooms, but they are time-consuming to develop and code, and it is hard to share or hand them off between different instructors of the same course teaching in different semesters. This project will share a cool new Moodle capability that collects good online exercises in a shared department repository and makes it easy to pick and choose those that you like from the repository and insert them into the course webpage for a particular semester. It’s similar to perusing all the problems at the end of chapters in a textbook (or textbooks) and then cherry-picking those that you prefer to use for your students. Only better, because these come with randomization features and computer-grading functions, to discourage cheating and free you from grading tedium!

I-LEaP: shifting the culture to value evidence-based instruction in CoE by introducing new faculty to key principles and strategies

Jamie Henke, Tim Paustian, Chris Dakes, Sarah Miller

Active Learning in a Large (400+) Enrollment Fr/So Course: Results from a First Attempt and Plans for the Future

Robert Witt, Gregory Moses

Until the 2014/2015 academic year, Statics, a first engineering course taken by 400 ~ 500 freshmen and sophomore engineering students per semester, had been taught in a traditional fashion: two large conventional lectures of 200 ~ 250 students followed by small discussion sections ( ~ 25 per class) led by graduate student TAs. In the 2014/2015 AY, the course was completely restructured to focus completely on active learning activities, with a flipped classroom during the traditional “lecture” periods, and varied group activities within novel discussion sections held in the WisCEL space. We describe the details of the restructuring, observations of student behavior, differences in student performance between conventional and new formats and plans for the future to improve student performance.

Three fully online 1-credit computational engineering courses

Sage Kokjohn, Gregory Moses, and Amit Nimunkar

Three fully online 1-credit computational engineering courses are offered by three departments for all engineering students. Engineering Physics offers Engineering Problem-solving with Maple, Mechanical Engineering offers Engineering Problem-solving with EES and Biomedical Engineering offers Engineering Problem-solving with LabView. Each course is offered over different 5 week intervals during a semester and students may elect to take all three courses for a complete 3-credit survey of problem-solving with different software tools.